Have you ever had a really good AdSense Day followed by a “much-worse-than-average” one?

The current way AdSense is setup you have no way to figure out how much money you get paid for a specific click. How do we know that they are “doing the right thing” when it comes to paying sites running ads? I have a feeling that their “do no evil” mantra will be a distant memory a few years from now. I’m actually looking forward to the time when Google is hated as much as Microsoft is today. Maybe when the ipod dies everyone will go back to hating apple as well.

Anyway, if you watch your adsense stats close enough you can more or less see how much individual clicks are worth, or at least figure out an average for a day’s worth of clicks on a particular ad channel. Do the prices paid by advertisers really vary that much? How it is I can have several $1 clicks one day, then only $.07/click the next day for the very same pages? Perhaps the ads being shown are different, but why would they be if the content hasn’t changed? I almost feel like Google has some kind of system in place to “balance” out your earnings. I had about a week straight of good days, then all of the sudden 2 really bad days in a row (with the same traffic).

The unfortunate part is that anyone can speculate about these sorts of things all they want, but since we have no transparency into Google whatsoever other than what Matt Cutts feeds us, we have no way to know what is going on. Some people believe he only exists to spread disinformation. Why would he be feeding information to SEO people when Google flat out doesn’t like SEO?

I’m not really accusing Google of cheating anybody, but merely posing the question: How would we know if they were?

~Wealthy Webmaster

Bill Gates just announced that he’ll leave his full time job at the company in 2 years to focus on his charity (the bill & melinda gates foundation). This is big news. July 2008 is a long way off, but it will be interesting to see what happens to the company without him. Other people are stepping up to fill the gaps he’ll leave.

Get the story here!

Using Google Analytics on a few of my sites I was able to find out how many people are bouncing from my site. “Bouncing” in case you don’t know, is the term for when someone comes to your page and hits the back button without visiting any other content on your site. Usually this is a fairly large number that would shock most people. I believe the average is somewhere between 20-60%. On one of my sites this number was HUGE. Normally once someone hits the back button they are lost and you’ll never make a cent from them. This is very unfortunate, especially if you got them to your site via a PPC ad. I found a new service which can help you monetize these visitors. StopBounce uses a script you install on your entry pages that you want to harness the bounced visitors. When they leave your site quickly without doing anything else an advertisement is displayed and you make some money. They give you the flexibility to choose which traffic sources will trigger the ads, and also feature channels similar to google adsense.

Some people are dead set against ads like this, but keep in mind that normal visitors (the ones you really care about) would never see these ads. I think this service is a great idea and can help squeeze a little more money out of your site.

I’ve been doing some reading lately about Linkbait. What is linkbait you ask? It is creating some kind of content on your site with the express purpose of getting other people to link to it. Now call me crazy, but it seems like EVERYTHING on your site should be link bait. If you aren’t trying to create something people want to link to, wtf are you doing? I’m surprised that there even needs to be a term for this practice.

Some people have come up with some pointers on how to write blog posts that qualify as linkbait.. and here is what I believe the important bits of that are:

• Controversy. People will link to you if they think you’re crazy or just to point out your point of view to others.
• Funny or Strange. I can’t even begin to guess how many billions of emails and URLs must get forwarded around the planet every day just because they’re funny or strange. Social networking sites make this stuff easy to share. MySpace whoring anyone?
• BUZZ! Clearly if you write something related to currently popular items such as the ipod, SEO, or current events, people will be more likely to be interested. The more people that are interested the more likely it will be that your link will spread like wildfire.

Do I really care about linkbait? Sure, it would be nice to get huge spikes in site traffic for a day or two, but am I going to go out of my way to do it? Not likely.

I do have one method for producing linkbait that I’m surprised hasn’t seen more widespread use, but I’m not ready to share that with the world for free just yet.

Technorati : linkbait

Am I the only one that is sick and tired of the Internet Marketing gurus and their multi-hundred dollar products? All they’re selling is marketing. Every one of their product that says something to the tune of “learn how this broke loser made $92,046 living in the basement in 3 months”… and the way that person made money is by creating some kind of internet marketing product. Then they create another internet marketing product that explains how they made the first one, and sell it for $200. WTF? If I wanted to sell Marketing that’s what I’d be doing. I don’t want to sell things to webmasters. Give us something real that normal people can use.